July 6, 1963 - Three Northern folk singers led by Pete Seeger brought a folk-song festival to the Deep South this evening. They sang in the yard of a Negro farm home on the edge of a cotton patch three miles south of Greenwood, Mississippi. The festival was sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which has been conducting a voter registration drive among Negroes in Mississippi delta towns for more than a year. The festival was attended by 300 persons. Three cars with white men in them parked in a lane across the highway from the performers. There was also a highway patrol car with two policemen sitting along the road. There were no incidents. Joining Mr. Seeger in leading the songfest were Theodore Bikel and Bob Dylan. There was also a Negro trio, the Freedom Singers, from Albany, Ga. All paid their own expenses for the trip and sang without a fee. Mr. Dylan dedicated one of his songs to Medgar Evers, Mississippi field secretary of the NAACP, who was slain last month in Jackson, Miss. A Greenwood man, Byron de la Beckwith, has been indicted in the shooting. The refrain of Mr. Dylan’s song was that the man who shot Mr. Evers didn’t know what he was doing and was “only a pawn in their game.”
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